Ukwuachu to have new trial on appeal
A Waco appeals court has overturned the sexual assault conviction of Sam Ukwuachu, the former Baylor football player whose case helped bring the university’s sexual assault scandal to light, and ordered he be given a new trial.
Ukwuachu, 23, who played in high school at Pearland, was sentenced to six months in jail and 10 years of probation in August 2015 for sexually assaulting a former Baylor women’s soccer player.
He won an appeal to the 10th Court of Appeals
on Wednesday, when the three-justice panel ruled he deserved a new trial because the original trial court improperly excluded some text messages from evidence. If convicted a second time, he could face up to 20 years in prison.
A date for a new trial for Ukwuachu has not been set.
McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna vowed to appeal the decision to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court for criminal cases.
“We will continue to fight on behalf of our victim and her family,” he said in a statement Thursday. “I am extremely confident in the decisions made by our prosecutors and the rulings made by” the trial judge, Matt Johnson.
Ukwuachu’s lawyer, William Bratton III, said Thursday he was pleased by the ruling. Though the justices focused on the text message issue, he raised several other issues with the appeals court and said he’s confident those issues would weigh in his favor in any further appeal.
There is the potential for Ukwuachu to receive a harsher sentence if convicted again, but he said “Sam was convinced that in a fair trial, he doesn’t need to worry about that.”
The text messages in question were between the victim and a friend immediately before and after the time the woman said the sexual assault occurred.
The woman texted her friend to say she and Ukwuachu were not coming to a homecoming party. After a short break, the ruling said, the woman texted that Ukwuachu had “basically raped” her.
Text messages at issue
During the 2015 trial, the judge allowed prosecutors to present text messages from after the alleged assault, but prohibited earlier texts under a rule that says evidence about a victim’s past sexual behavior is not allowed.
But the appellate court wrote that the texts “were made immediately prior to the offense and appeared to potentially relate to prior occasions where the victim and Ukwuachu had engaged in some type of sexual conduct.”
The messages should have been included in their entirety, the court ruled, because they were central to the defense’s argument that the sex was consensual. After reviewing the messages, the court ruled they “were not particularly graphic nor did they paint the victim in a negative light.”
The court said it could not be sure that excluding the text messages did not affect the jury’s decision, “especially when considered with the other alleged errors in the trial.”
John Clune, a lawyer who represented the woman in resolving her complaints against Baylor, tweeted Thursday the appeals court had made a “bad ruling.”
A spokeswoman for the university declined to comment on his disciplinary record, citing student privacy.
ESPN reported Ukwuachu had maintained his innocence in a series of emails in recent months. In one February email, he wrote to ESPN: “Im smart enough to know when ive been screwed over and im smart enough to get to the bottom of things and thats what ive been doing for the past year.”
Ukwuachu was the second Baylor football player to be convicted of sexual assault in two years, and his case prompted the university to hire an outside law firm to review its handling of assault allegations.
The investigation found Baylor had institution-wide failures in its response to sexual assault, including in its athletics program.
Widespread incidents
At least 19 football players have been accused of sexual or physical assault, including four gang rapes, since 2011, the school has said. One estimate — included in a lawsuit filed against Baylor this year — alleges that figure could be much higher, with as many as 31 football players committing 52 acts of rape between 2011 and 2014.
On the same day the decision to overturn Ukwuachu’s conviction came down, another former Baylor football player was arrested on a sexual assault charge related to a 2013 case. Tre’Von Armstead previously had only been named as a suspect in the gang rape of a woman after a party.